When Universities Sell Patents to Trolls, Publicly Funded Research Is Compromised

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the state of publicly funded research. Many, including EFF, have long called on Congress to pass a law requiring that publicly funded research be made available to the public.

With strong support for FASTR (the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act) in both parties, Vice-President Biden making open access a major component of his Cancer Moonshot initiative, and presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton including access to research in her platform, signs are looking good that Congress will finally pass an open access mandate. It’s just a matter of when.

Even if we pass an open access law this year, though, there’s still a major obstacle in the way of publicly funded research fully benefiting the public: patent trolls.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in the United States.

EFF provides funds for legal defense in court, presents amici curiae briefs, defends individuals and new technologies from what it considers baseless or misdirected legal threats, works to expose government malfeasance, provides guidance to the government and courts, organizes political action and mass mailings, supports some new technologies which it believes preserve personal freedoms, maintains a database and web sites of related news and information, monitors and challenges potential legislation that it believes would infringe on personal liberties and fair use, and solicits a list of what it considers patent abuses with intentions to defeat those that it considers without merit.

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November 16, 2016 - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) and the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) have weighed in on Facebook's high-profile dispute with a social media aggregation company over whether it had unlawfully accessed Facebook's computers. The EFF ...

November 4, 2016 - Just recently the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published an extraordinary request to research universities as part of its “Reclaim Invention” campaign: please stop putting your patents into the hands of insidious patent trolls. EFF seeks to ...

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December 1, 2016 - SEATTLE - When firefighter paramedics Morlon Malveaux and Mark Pedeferri learned that their powerhorse diesel ambulance was going to be traded for a gas-powered hybrid they were more than a little concerned. The two, who run a Medic One rig ...